IRELAND 59
For running away, Ireland bore Shaw no permanent ill-
will: on the contrary, in the fullness of time she became
proud of him. For a ninetieth birthday present Dublin
gave him the honorary freedom of her city, its roll receiving
the familiar Shavian signature on 2,8th August 1946.
Lastly before leaving Ireland, Shaw's attitude to animals
may be fittingly considered here, since it is in youth that a
man comes to terms with animals, or doesn't. Does Shaw
detest,-tolerate, or like them? Most people, I fear, would
guess that he liked them only in theory and on paper.
A guess so uncharitable (and wrong) would be due largely
to the difficulty of picturing Shaw in contact with animals,
so closely is he associated in the public mind with the
platform and with that impregnable fortress of the shy, the
study desk. As previously noted, Shaw respects animals;
and for this live-and-let-live attitude, which precludes
doting, it seems that animals like him. He was brought
up with animals about the house, and a dog and a parrot
provided him with the kind of education which he could
understand and value. *It amuses me,' he tells us, cto
talk to animals in a sort of jargon I have invented for
them; and it seems to me that it amuses them to be talked
to, and that they respond to the tone of the conversation,
though its full intellectual content may to some extent escape
them. Further, it gives me extraordinary gratification to
find a wild bird treating me with confidence, as robins
sometimes do.'
Aware of our kinship with animals, Shaw indeed feels
that he possesses this sense in a greater degree than most
people, and while he agrees that it may be necessary for
a variety of reasons to kill, say, a rhinoceros, he would
never agree that killing it for fun was one of them. When
he was told as a child that the dog and the parrot were not
creatures like himself, and that an impassable gulf was
fixed between the animal creation and the human, he flatly
refused to believe it. His nurse's proud tale of humanity
giving itself airs and immortality at the expense of its dumb
brothers who could not even answer back, convinced the
boy of nothing except the desirability of escaping as soon as
possible from the grasp of all nurses and religions that